t
that way, was it in Alan Macdonald to make a hawk's dash like that? It
was hard to admit the thought, to give standing to the doubtful
accusation. But those whom they called "rustlers" must have borne Nola
away. Beyond the homesteaders up the river were the mountains and the
wild country where no man made his home; except them and the cattlemen
and the cowboys attending the herds, that country was unpeopled. There
was nobody to whom the deed could be charged but the enemies that
Chadron had made in his persecution of the homesteaders.

Perhaps they were not of the type that Macdonald described; maybe the
cattlemen were just in their arraignment of them for thieves and
skulking rascals, and Macdonald was no better than the reputation that
common report gave him. The mere fact of his defense of them in words,
and his association with them, seemed to convict him there in the
silence of that black-walled court of night.

It was either that he was blinded to the deviltries of his associates
by his own high intentions, or as shrewdly dishonest as any scoundrel
that ever rode the wilds. He could be that, and carry it off before a
sharper judge than she. So she said, finding it hard to excuse his
blindness, if blindness it might be; unable to mitigate in any degree
the blame, even passive knowledge of the intent, of that base
offense.

At length, through all the fog of her groping and piecing together,
she reached what she believed to be the motive which lay behind the
deed. The rustlers doubtless were aware of the blow that Chadron was
preparing to deliver upon them in retaliation for his recent losses.
They had carried off his daughter to make her the price of their own
immunity, or else to extract from him a ransom that would indemnify
them for quitting their lairs in the land upon which they preyed.

She explained this to Mrs. Chadron when it became clear to her own
mind. Mrs. Chadron seemed to draw considerable hope from it that she
should receive her daughter back again unharmed in a little while.

The rest of the night the two women spent at the gate, and in the road
up and down in front of it, straining for the sound of a hoof that
might bring them tidings. Mrs. Chadron kept up a moaning like an
infant whose distress no mind can read, no hand relieve. Now and then
she burst into a shrill and sudden cry, and time and again she
imagined that she heard Nola calling her, and dashed off along the
road with answering